Re: [gentoo-user] lyx & texlive

[b.n.]

Willie Wong ha scritto:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:16:46AM +0200, Penguin Lover b.n. squawked:
>> Whoa. I didn't know anything about that. Thanks for you linking that.
>> BTW, where should I have read the announcement of that stuff?
>
> Behold! The Power of Google!
>
> I wanted to test out the TeX Live ebuild (partly because it
> includes some fonts that are not distributed by the standard vanilla
> tetex; partly because tetex is EOLed and I need to find a migration
> path), so I thought, "The ebuild's been in the tree for ${DEITY}-knows
> how long and somebody *must* have done it already; furthermore, I see
> all these USE flags and it must be complicated, so if somebody's done
> it, he or she *must* have blogged about it."
>
> With that in mind, I typed "gentoo texlive" into Google. Not exactly
> what I expected to find, but more than satisfactory.

ehm, I guess I wasn't clear.
You *already* knew:
- That there are texlive and tetex
- That tetex was EOLed and texlive was the next choice
- That tetex and texlive are mutually exclusive
- That the ebuild was in the tree

I knew, instead:
- You want to install latex, this usually pushes down tetex. I always 
had tetex, on Gentoo and non-Gentoo distros, and I didn't ask myself 
anything about texlive.
- I even *didn't know* there is texlive. Why should I have known? tetex 
works. I don't care how it works, I use Kile, pdflatex, and if it 
happily generates my ph.d. thesis, I don't dive into the details.
- I didn't certainly know tetex was into problems: was there a 
widespread announcement of that *for people not following tetex 
development*?
- Knowing nothing about what tetex, texlive etc. are, I even could 
expect that they could happily live together (e.g., if they are two 
implementations of tex, that one could eselect one or the other. Naive, 
but why not?)
- Knowing nothing about texlive, I couldn't know there was its ebuild.
- If I wasnt' currently writing a paper with latex, I probably would 
have even ignored this thread. The fact I'm currently dealing again with 
latex after a 2-year interval led me curiously to see what was it all 
about. From the title, I thought that texlive was something like lyx and 
people were asking for a comparison...what a surprise.

Furthermore, kudos to your prudence: seeing a lot of use flags never 
raised me thoughts like "it must be complicated": it just lets me think 
"whoa, lots of nice options!".

Apart from this last point, that may just me being dense, where was that 
knowledge announced? Was it in the GMN (in that case, my fault)? Is 
there something else that I should regularly check for stuff like that? 
(another thing was the expat upgrade, which I understood was troublesome 
only from posts on this ML).   I am subscribed to gentoo-announce, but 
there only a huge mass of GLSA are usually posted. What news source am I 
missing? Since it's 4 years I use Gentoo, I feel quite sad about that...

m.
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